The Time: The future. Way, way in the future, like when you get an estimate on how long it’ll take them to paint your house and it goes way past the estimate and they are charging you for like rags and stuff. What’s up with that? So yeah, that far in the future.

The Place: Space. Somewhere like in a nebula or something. Or a black hole. Whichever is cooler, take your pick. Maybe Underwater? Nah, space.

Super Space Guy Hunk Blockcheese strides across the bridge of his spaceship. It’s really awesome with lots of expensive bling. He stops near the navigator, Callie Fornia, and flexes. He’s like got a crush on her and stuff but he’s too much of a wuss to tell her, so after a couple of minutes he goes to the gym to oil his pecs.

Meanwhile, somewhere else far away, maybe on a planet or a moon or something, there’s this evil guy all covered with tats. He has like a real mad on for Hunk Blockcheese because of something that happened in high school. It was totally his mom’s fault for always buying him those cheap department store pants. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

Blockcheese comes back from the gym, all pumped up. He sits in his chair and wants to know like where they are, you know, with coordinates and things like that. He’s trying to sound all professional and stuff because he thinks Callie Fornia likes those kinda guys.

I’m into things like ghosts and UFO’s (which is why I’m so hard on George Noory) and I just finished reading The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects from 1956 by Edward J. Ruppelt. He’s one of the original Project Blue Book leaders.

Project Blue Book was one of the Air Force’s attempts to investigate the UFO phenomena. It’s an interesting read, though you won’t learn much other than the Air Force in the 1950’s was as full of red tape as it is now.

But it reminded me that there was a TV show based on this called Project U.F.O. and it scared the heck out of me when I was a kid.

From the internet:

Project U.F.O. is an American anthology television series which ran on NBC from 1978 to 1979. Running for two seasons of 13 episodes each, the show was based loosely on the real-life Project Blue Book. The show was created by Jack Webb, who pored through Air Force files looking for episode ideas.

The show features two U.S. Air Force investigators charged with investigating UFO sightings.

In an odd reversal of the Scooby-Doo dynamic, the series eventually settled into a pattern in which the investigators would spend most of the hour uncovering some conventional explanation for a UFO sighting, only for the last five minutes to reveal that UFOs (or some similarly unexplained phenomena) were involved after all.

I went to Youtube and found the specific episode that terrified young me, The Believe It or Not Incident. I saw the thumbnail and like a flash, I suddenly knew that it was the one episode that gripped me back then. It was so clear. This show has not aired in the United States since its original airing so this was the first time I saw it since 1979. I have not thought about this show in literally over 30 years, at least. Not since the last century!

Well, I can’t say it opened up a floodgate of memories, but it did bring back a couple. What scared me so much were scenes of a giant alien ship replaying images of people and events as it hovered over a man in the desert. These were scenes the aliens inside had no earthly way of seeing. (It’s around the 19 minute mark in the video at the end of this post.)

For years that part stuck in my head, gave me nightmares and kept me up at night. I’d nervously look up into the sky when I was outdoors, and I live in crowded NYC. The other part that spooked me was at the end of the episode, when the house shakes as the giant ship passes overhead.

Nowadays I’m not sure anyone but me would be creeped out by it, and had this not been the stuff of childhood nightmares I, seeing this for the first time now, would be bored. But little 1979 me was spooked badly. For a long time that UFO replay was the cause of that tingle at the back of my neck.

Much like my last post about the audio tapes, I was again brought back to a moment in my childhood when all it took to scare me were cheesy special effects and my imagination.